Rocks: tackling key challenges

A rock thrown in a pond has a ripple effect. It is precisely this effect that CropXR is after when it introduced the first set of ‘Rocks’ during the CropXR conference in October 2024. The Rocks are short-term goals and activities that focus on key challenges. They are meant to inspire the community and accelerate the CropXR program. At the beginning of 2025, the community takes stock of its first Rocks. What has been achieved so far, and which new activities will rock the community in the next three months? 

More about the Rocks 

Rocks are quarterly goals, pro-active interventions with multiple purposes, among which: creating awareness, solving obstacles or stimulating experiments.  
 
Rocks can also accelerate necessary developments that might have been procrastinated or overlooked otherwise. The Rocks provide focus and call on members of the CropXR community to commit themselves to a particular task. This can boost energy and strengthen collaboration. All Rocks are SMART: Simple, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-bound.  
 
The first Rocks have resulted in many envisioned ripple effects. These outcomes serve as an excellent encouragement to work on the new Rocks.  

Digital Connection

During the CropXR conference the idea was born to better connect all computational and modelling scientists within CropXR. Strengthening this network made sense as these professionals work for different organisations. The Rock ‘Digital Connection’ was launched within the success strategy Data-Driven Design with the purpose to bring together computational researchers, bioinformaticians, AI specialists, and modellers. By connecting them and bridging different modelling methodologies, their knowledge exchange would improve. Other goals of this Rock have been to build an active community around data-driven approaches and explore how models and computational approaches can contribute to understand crop resilience. How can this be used to develop smart breeding methodologies has been another pivotal question.

The initial Rock team approached PhD candidates in the field of data science. Four PhD candidates, affiliated to four different universities, then joined the team with great enthusiasm.

As a first step a questionnaire was sent to over thirty computational
scientist and modellers. Their answers served to make an inventory of the expertise and wishes for the Rock. The input from seventeen researchers is now being used by the PhD team. They will organise a first meeting and develop plans to create an interactive and open community within CropXR to exchange expertise and ideas. Some ideas that were proposed for the Digital Connection were, among others, hackathons, a journal club, online seminars and a mini symposium.

Team: Jordan Earle, Corné Verburg, Janne Bibbe, Ray Hendriks, and Guido van den Ackerveken,
Bernard de Geus (owner, accountable).

Meta Buddy

Connected to the success strategy ‘Resilience Hub’, the Meta Buddy Rock was formulated to foster more efficiency in the workings of the digital infrastructure. The work of CropXR requires large amounts of high-quality data. The various teams conduct experiments that yield large amounts of data over a long period of time. Everybody within CropXR should be able to find, access and work with all this data. It is, therefore, crucial that all this data is labeled in a clear manner. ‘Meta data’ can be understood as the additional information or label data receives. This label helps to store and find the data easily. It is important that the meta data is applied according to the appropriate data standards.  

Since describing meta data is a tedious and time-consuming task which all researchers need to engage with, it makes sense to facilitate this work and support its standardisation. Hence, the Meta Buddy is a welcome instrument. This buddy should make the process of adding meta data easier and faster and increase the quality of the meta data. Moreover, it can contribute to making the work part of the routine, preventing any hassle.

Meta Buddy is envisioned as an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to revolutionise how researchers interact with data. The core concept is to create an interactive and intelligent system that guides researchers to capture meta data.  It is not realistic to completely develop a Meta Buddy within merely three months’ time. This Rock served to kick-start the process. In the past months, the Meta Buddy team has made progress describing the requirements of the digital assistant and has drafted a request for proposal. The request for proposal will be sent to highly skilled AI software development parties with the request to create their proposal for the development of a prototype of the Meta Buddy. The aim is to have a prototype developed before the summer of 2025. 

 Team: Christoph Lofi, Balu Estamsetty, Sören Wacker, Thomas Abeel and Auke Damstra (owner, accountable). 

Crop eXposed: boosting the website

Connected to the success strategy ‘Coalition’, the purpose of the Rock ‘CropExposed’ has been to give an impulse to improving the website. Until recently, the dynamics of the community and its diverse activities were not sufficiently conveyed on the website. As the website is an important instrument in its external communication, CropXR deemed revisions necessary. The goals of the Rock were to add new information, enhance the visibility of activities of the different teams and improve the user experience of the website. 

Thanks to great teamwork, all the goals that were formulated for this Rock have been reached. The Work package leaders and people of the central office collaborated to draft and refine texts and collect visual material. IT of Humanities (Utrecht University) created some new features for the website. All the efforts have led to many improvements. Web visitors, for instance, wo would like to better understand what CropXR does are served with more explanations. Likewise, those interested in finding employment at CropXR are informed in an attractive manner. Moreover, the various CropXR teams have ownership of their own team pages. This will facilitate future additions or improvements. 

The next step will be a complete revamp of the website. This will take place in due time. For now, CropXR invites all community members to browse the website and check out the recent changes.  

Team: Rachel Visscher, Rianne Ettekoven, WP-leads, Simon Welling, Hanna Cornelisse, Hedwich Teunissen (owner, accountable).  

Tropical Caulipower

This Rock has had the purpose to boost the development of the Cauliflower Flagship program within the success strategy Accelerator. Henk Huits (Liaison officer vegetables) took over the role of Jeroen Rouppe van der Voort as the owner of this Rock. The main goal has been to further develop the long-term plan for the Cauliflower Flagship and to explore how to connect other companies to this program. Important steps have been taken in the past three months.

Team: Jeroen Rouppe van der Voort, Richard Immink, Guido van den Ackerveken and Henk Huits (owner, accountable).

New Rocks

CropXR is proud to introduce its new quarterly Rocks to the community: 

Multi-Mindset

CropXR is keen on acceleration, which is one of its success strategies. It has, therefore, formulated the Rock ‘Multi-Mindset’. The purpose of this Rock is to increase awareness and strengthen the commitment of all individuals and partners. This Rocks invites all those engaged in CropXR to join a discussion on questions related to CropXR’s unique collaboration. What does it mean to be a member of a public-private partnership like CropXR? How can everyone contribute to realising the common goals? What can the consortium do for a person individually?

During the progress of this Rock, the aim is to spur ideas. How to increase synergies that enhance the effectiveness of the multi-disciplinary and systems approach? This Rock will commence with a mini training on collaborating in an interdisciplinary environment. Thirty individuals within CropXR will be selected to participate in this training during which they will formulate ten new ideas.  

Team: Atoesa Farokhi, Guido van den Ackerveken, Rianne Ettekoven & Hedwich Teunissen (owner, accountable). More people will join. Preferably PhD candidates involved in the Digital Connection Rock and the Minor team members from Education. 

Hub Horizon

This new Rock is in line with the success strategy ‘Resilience Hub’. The Resilience Hub or data infrastructure supports research. How can this be done in the best possible way? What are the needs and requirements of researchers regarding data storage, analytics, data sharing, computing, modelling or visualisation? The Hub Horizon is meant to discover which needs exist, either in an individual researcher, a team or in various teams. Furthermore, the team of this Rock will engage in a dialogue with the community to further explain the vision of the Resilience Hub.

In the next three months, the Rock’s team will work on a Resilience Hub Roadmap that includes requirements that are written down in a MOSCOW structure (Must haves, Should haves, Could haves and Would haves) and a timeline. In addition, an explainer video will be created. This video will elucidate the vision of the Resilience Hub and the needs and requirements of CropXR regarding the DataXR infrastructure. Moreover, some people within CropXR will be appointed as ‘Resilience Hub Ambassadors’. They will contribute to disseminating information and answering questions of other colleagues.  

Team: the team has yet to be forged. If you would like to join this Rock Team, please send a message to Auke Damstra (owner, accountable).  

Cut the Crop 

This new Rock is grounded in the success strategy ‘Coalition’. To foster the CropXR coalition, CropXR introduces a new approach: Crop Teams. These cross-disciplinary teams will unite universities of applied sciences and universities. The initiative is based on the core values of the institute: openness, commitment, and trust. After 3 months, the new Crop Teams will be fully staffed. Moreover, they will have formulated a long-term vision. In addition, roles and responsibilities will be clearly defined. Furthermore, a governance structure will be published, covering all processes in the Learning Community. This Rock will boost the collaboration throughout the coalition through impactful Applied Research projects. Moreover, it will enhance the transparency in the Learning Community.

Team: the team is currently being assembled. Several people are already part of the team: Henk Huits, Milan Plasmeijer, Roos van Maanen, Hedwich Teunissen and Atoesa Farohki (owner, accountable). More people will join soon. 

ExperimentXR  

This Rock finds its root in the Data-Driven Design success strategy and is intended to boost the large gene expression experiment within the Demonstrator work package. This important experiment is required to build gene expression modules that will be integrated with mechanistic models on seedling establishment under drought and temperature stress. This Rock aims to provide extra attention. This is needed because of the importance of a thorough planning and alignment of this labour-intensive experiment. Moreover, delays due to technical problems justify the focus this Rock will provide. To achieve the best possible results, the Rock team will support optimal management, planning and execution of the experiment. Clear roles and responsibilities will be defined to make sure that the aims of the experiment will be attained.   

Team: Christa Testerink, Francesca Giaume, Marrit Alderkamp, Bernard de Geus, Guido van den Ackerveken (owner, accountable).